In years to come, someone – perhaps me – will write the Actual History Of Rangers. It will not be like the versions that appear elsewhere. It will be a searing indictment of the club, and an expose of the individuals at the banks and in the governing bodies who helped them through “the glory years” when they could outspend every club in Scotland by a factor of three or four and still decided to augment it with a tax fraud.
I have long argued on this site and elsewhere that the club their fans thought they followed never actually existed; when I read earlier in the week that Gough had called that whole period “an anomaly” I thought that perhaps we were finally getting someone to break ranks on the issue and tell the pure, unvarnished, truth about that period.
But of course he wasn’t. He came just halfway … but he never took it forward to its natural, and wholly truthful, conclusion, which is that all of it was a shadow on the wall. The club he signed for was a phantom. On some level, I know he gets that.
He rightly pointed out that that idea of any Scottish team signing the team captain of Tottenham these days would be ludicrous; it was ludicrous then too. The money necessary to do it was only available to the club because the bank that was actually financing Murray’s insane spending was in the hands of a reckless bunch of men who indulged him more than was ever reasonable, even as they later tried to strangle us over the sum of £7 million.
It is an outrage which has still never been properly recognised.
Gough talks as if every club in Scotland was able to do that at the time, and indeed a lot of sides here were spending far more than they earned. Every single one of them paid for that, especially clubs like Dundee, whose bankers (the same ones as at Ibrox) allowed them to go only so far into debt before they started reigning them in. Even then, nobody else was signing teams full of international players and behaving like Posh Spice on cocaine.
Gough is correct to say that those days are never coming back, but he attempts to frame this as a verdict on the Scottish game itself instead as a reference to one club. We went out and signed Scott Sinclair at the start of the season. We can still afford to bring in very good players.
The problem for Gough and his club is that Sevco can’t.
He is right to call it an anomaly, but the entire story of Rangers from the moment Murray bought it was an anomaly. In fact, the insanity started before he came along, with David Holmes bringing in Souness and giving him the cash to go for people like Woods and Butcher, taking advantage of English clubs being absent from Europe.
Sevco thinks it is Rangers. Sevco fans believe they can have it all, the off-shelf history, the trophies, the glory years … and that Sevco can grow into that. It’s the worst mistake they’ve made, the gravest miscalculation in a rash of them.
They can listen to Gough and put this down to the decline of Scottish football, but that only tells part of the story. Their entire club was built with other people’s money, either in the form of bank debt or in tax fraud. The party is over. Those days ain’t coming back.
Their club has to accept certain truths or it will be stuck in a self-destructive loop.
King is not going to do what Murray did. No-one could, not even Murray again.
The banks will not tolerate it. UEFA would not allow it. Their club is going to have to live within its means and Gough came closer than anyone on their side has in years to spelling it out to them. They can choose to listen or not. They can accept how much has changed or not.
But their team is scrambling around right now trying to sign freebies like Ryan Jack and offering reserve players in part exchange to sign a striker at Motherwell.
Surely even they must see the truth in what Gough had to say, and the writing on the wall?
If they think they’re going to assemble a world beating team this summer they had better think again.
Rangers was built by bankers who ended up under investigation and by a tax fraud which still is.
It was not an anomoly. It was a crime.